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"I don't care what they think," said Robert. What Mrs. Coolahan may have thought, as we dived from the sunlight into her dark and porter-sodden shop, did not appear; what she looked was consternation. "Luncheon!" she repeated with stupefaction, "luncheon! The dear help us, I have no luncheon for the like o' ye!" "Oh, anything will do," said Robert cheerfully.

"What ails Julia Cronelly at all that your honour's ladyship is comin' to the like o' this dirty place for your dinner?" "Oh, Julia's run away with a soldier!" struck in Robert brilliantly. "Small blame to her if she did itself!" said Mrs. Coolahan, gallantly accepting the jest without a change of her enormous countenance, she's a long time waiting for the chance!

Neither I nor my remonstrances overtook him till he was well out into the street. There, outside the Coolahan door, was the Dean's inside car, resting on its shafts; while the black horse, like his driver, restored himself elsewhere beneath the Coolahan roof. Robert paid no heed to its silent warning. "I must go myself. If I had forty pencils I couldn't explain to Julia the flies that I want!"

It would be necessary to confide the position to Croppy, but this we felt, could be done without a moment's uneasiness. By the malignity that governed all things on that troublous day, neither of us had a pencil, and Mrs. Coolahan had to be appealed to.

Coolahan, "it might as well be the Inspector that came in the office, asking for the pin, an' if that was the way we might all go under the sod! Sich a mee-aw!" "Musha! Musha!" breathed, prayerfully, one of the shawled women.

Is it a writing pin ye want, Miss?" she continued, moving to the door. "Katty Ann! Bring me in the pin out o' the office!" The Post Office was, it may be mentioned, a department of the Coolahan public-house, and was managed by a committee of the younger members of the Coolahan family. These things are all, I believe, illegal, but they happen in Ireland.

Coolahan, a taciturn person, with a blue-black chin and a gloomy demeanour. "Where had ye it last?" he demanded. "I seen Katty Ann with it in the cow-house, sir," volunteered a small female Coolahan from beneath the flap of the counter. Katty Ann, with a vindictive eye at the tell-tale, vanished. "That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!" chanted Mrs. Coolahan. "Such a mee-aw!

The committee was at present, apparently, in full session, judging by the flood of conversation that flowed in to us through the open door. The request for the pen caused an instant hush, followed at an interval by the slamming of drawers and other sounds of search. "Ah, what's on ye delaying this way?" said Mrs. Coolahan irritably, advancing into the shop.

Maybe ourselves'd go if we were axed! I have a nice bit of salt pork in the house," she continued, "would I give your honours a rasher of it?" Mrs. Coolahan had probably assumed that either Julia was incapably drunk, or had been dismissed without benefit of clergy; at all events she had recognised that diplomatically it was correct to change the conversation.

"'Twasn't in it," she whined, "nor I didn't put it in it." "For a pinny I'd give ye a slap in the jaw!" said Mr. Coolahan with sudden and startling ferocity. "That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!" reiterated Mrs. Coolahan, while the search spread upwards through the house. "Look here!" said Robert abruptly, "this business is going on for a week. I'm going for the things myself."